where words collide

Month: April 2016

I wake up in my prison cell for the very last time. Today is the last day I will ever be locked up or restrained or told when it’s okay to eat or when it’s okay to take a shower. Today is the last day and I feel hopeful.

I wake up early and trudge down to the dining hall in a straight line behind killers and child abusers, thieves and drug addicts like me. I walk in the line with mothers who miss their children, wives, and daughters. I walk to the dining hall and eat the very last meal I will ever have behind bars. It tastes like shit, but I happily eat every bite. It is the last meal I will ever have in prison.

My parents, though they are divorced, wait to pick me up outside of the prison gates. I walk out of the building and down the meager sidewalk to a towering metal fence with a gate that rolls open and closed. Today, it opens for me. It opens for me and I hurry through.

I sit in the back of the same white pickup that my dad has had since I was twenty years old. I sit in the backseat with my face in my hands and I cry. The tears flood down my pale cheeks leaving streaks of redness in their wake. The tears come for all the pain I have endured, the tears come for all the mistakes I’ve made. The tears come for the hope of a better life ahead. I sit in the back of my dad’s pickup and I cry. Today I am free.

If I could do anything right at this moment, I’d pull on my pajama pants and slip on my shoes. I’d manage to trudge my overweight body up the flight of stairs to our neighbor’s apartment. I would use my sledgehammer to beat their door in. I would use my sledgehammer to smash the living fuck out of the cell phone that they have placed on their floor that keeps vibrating against my ceiling every five minutes. WAKE UP YOU PIECE OF SHIT.